Thieves and my vacation...

My family and I have been on vacation the last couple of weeks. We rented a minivan (gasp) and spent a week in Canada and then a week in The Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

This was a great vacation. We all had a great time. Realize that my daughter Kayla is almost 5 and my son Graydon is almost 3 and a half...

My kids were great. There were four days where we did a lot of driving. The fourth day we drove straight through from New York (780 miles) and my kids did not complain at all. They are great... (No, I did not drug them.)

The minivan did have a small DVD player and this helped quite a bit. We too six DVD movies. They watched each one once and they watched two of them twice... We drove a total of 2400 miles on this vacation.

I plan on posting some information about this vacation over the next few days as I do not want my entire blog to be political.

Saturday May 6th we drove up to Niagara Falls. On the way to Niagara Falls I had to stop and get gas. Believe it or not, the Dodge Caravan that I rented got about 22 miles per gallon, I was quite pleased. We stopped at a full service gas station in a small town. Full service gas stations are much more common in Canada then the United States.

I do not like full service gas stations myself. I stopped at one because I needed gas and could not find anything else on May 6th...

A young Canadian (Maybe 20 years old) came out and pumped my gas. I got out and talked to him while he pumped the gas. He was a friendly young man.

I glanced at the pump before we went inside so I could pay for the gas, so did the young man. When we got inside I found out that they would not accept my Discover card. Over the next 15 days I found out that most places in Canada would not accept my Discover card. I also found out that many places in The Adirondacks no longer accept Discover either.

He rang up 77.63 (Canadian dollars) on my Mastercard. I was pretty sure that the correct total was 72.63 and I told him so. He ran outside, looked at the pump, and came back inside and told me that he was right. After this verification I signed the receipt and paid him 77.63 (Canadian) on my credit card.

I left the gas station and decided to look at the total owed on the pump myself before getting back in the van and heading on down the road to Niagara Falls. Guess what?

I was right, I owed 72.63 and this young Canadian was trying to steal 5 Canadian dollars from me.

This obviously irritated me.

I went back inside the gas station and pointed his mistake out to him a second time. He came back outside with me and went and looked at the total on the pump a third time. He agreed with me that he had been incorrect.

We went back inside the gas station. He opened up the cash register till and asked me if I had 5 Canadian dollars. I did and I gave it to him thinking he would then give me 10 Canadian dollars and we would be even.

Instead the moron closed the cash register drawer and told me we were even.

This obviously irritated me even more... There were only two possibilities:
1. This young man was a thief and a stupid one to boot.
2. Canadians understand math far less then the average American.

A fairly long conversation ensued. He went and got his boss and they both argued with me. We spent a couple of minutes arguing and they eventually opened the cash register till and paid me 10 Canadian dollars so we were even.

I hate thieves...

They were thieves...

P.S. On average, I paid almost 4 US dollars per gallon for gasoline when in Canada.

Mike Sylvester